The seasonal cycle
Despite its heavyweight title, a newly published work by Rhiannon Comeau, Land, People and Power in Early Medieval Wales: the cantref of Cemais in comparative perspective, contains some striking evidence for the influence of solar and astronomical phenomena on the lives of the people of medieval Pembrokeshire.
One might expect that the timing of most agricultural activities would be flexible, and that such seasonal practices as ploughing, sowing, heath-burning, the closure of arable fields to grazing, and haymaking; the movement of people and animals to and from summer pastures, animal mating, and the use of woodland by pigs; and the harvest and the post-harvest grazing of open fields and meadows might all be governed by the weather and by local experience. Instead, it turns out that early medieval agriculture was just as much governed by the calendar as by rental payment dates and legal proceedings.
Rhiannon has scoured an impressive body of data from archaeological excavations, landscape surveys, place-names, written records, law codes, saints’ lives, and poetry, and has found a high degree of clustering of rural activities around eight key dates in the year – the spring and autumn equinoxes (21 March and 21 September), the summer and winter solstices (21 December and 21 June), and the intervening cross-quarter days (2 February, 1 May, 1 August, and 31 October). Based on this finding, Rhiannon paints a picture of the countryside alive with activity and movement on and around these eight dates, marked by seasonal fairs and markets, formal assemblies and informal gatherings, ancient cultic practices and church rituals, the payment of food rents and tribute, and the aristocratic displays associated with stag-, hind-, and boar-hunting.
